This is Part 4 of a series. You can find the other parts at Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Day Four: Friday September 14, 2001
Bright and early, we piled back into the car for the next leg of our journey. We had a sort of deadline in that Northwestern’s orientation was to begin at 6:00 that evening. I was calculating that the drive from Toronto to Chicago would be about 8 hours, so we would be there in plenty of time.
As we headed toward the border, traffic was getting heavy, and the radio was reporting delays ahead. I remembered the advice I had been given the night before, and we got off the highway and started heading north. It only took about a half hour to get to the border crossing that had been suggested. We passed a few signs and a couple of cute gift shops that confirmed we were on a native Canadian reservation. As we approached the border crossing, we were suddenly in a long line of cars. Even worse, what had not been told to us was that this border crossing required a ferry, which only ran once per hour. So we sat waiting for almost a full hour for the ferry to arrive, then it took another half hour to load the cars aboard, a 15-minute ride across the river, and then some additional time to unload. We had lost significant time. Continue reading “10 Years Ago…A Family Odyssey (part 4)”